Miata Mailing List: November 1996, Message #82
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   From: Keith Tanner 

Subject: CrazyRed seat report, part II

   Date: Fri, 1 Nov 1996 18:15:19 -0500



Whew - they're in.  Mr Blue, the soon-to-be-expatriated '90 in my garage, is

now sporting a set of Crazy Red leather seats.  The Reader's Digest version:

Wow!  Fantastic!



For those of you with longer attention spans, here's a full report on the

seats. 



The Crazy Red seats turned out to be as good as they looked on first opening

the box.  Fit was exemplary - seat covers have to be pretty precise, and

these fit perfectly.  They look like they belong in the car, not like an

add-on.  Some of the leather seats I've seen in Miatas are almost like

vinyl, and fit the same as the cloth seat covers do.  Not these - they still

manage to look aggressively bolstered and pillowy soft at the same time -

not a bad trick.  If you want to see photos, Dave DeNuzzo now has pictures

of the basic seats on his site at http://www.miata.net/crazyred.



Of course, we had to road test them.  Upon first getting into the car, both

myself and one of my frequent passengers noticed that you sit higher up, and

that the middle of the seat also seemed to be more padded, effectively

removing some of the bolstering.  I thought it may have been due to the fact

that my seats have been used a lot more (and Baby sits a lot lower), but I

hadn't noticed anything strange on earlier stints behind the wheel.  After

driving for a short while, however, they seemed to have compacted a bit and

settled into place.  They feel fine now - it was just eerie at first.  On

the road, we noticed that leather seats get chilly when you leave the car

parked with the top down when there are random snowflakes drifting around :)



Changing seat covers is not a trivial task - don't mistake these for a set

of CR air horns!  It took me an hour to do the first cushion, and I

gradually sped up.  Total time was probably about 3 -3.5 hours.  There's a

lot of cutting of little rings ("hog rings") that are in hard to reach

spots.  Once they're all cut and you've managed to pull the old covers off,

you have to replace them all!  It's not a terribly difficult job if you're

careful, but it's going to take a while.  I say the same thing about shock

replacement, by the way :)



My biggest complaint with the kit is that there are a few holes that need to

be punched in for the hinging hardware.  Poking holes isn't hard, but

finding the perfect place is!  It takes a bit of nerve to do.  I suppose if

the holes were pre-cut it might be hard to get them to line up perfectly -

this way, it looks gorgeous.  Still, not everyone feels as confident about

this as I do :)  I didn't get any of them in the wrong place, by the way, so

it can't be that tough :)  One note - the Enthusiast's Manual suggests that

you can re-use the hog rings.  Dave never even mentioned the possibility,

and I agree with him.  It wouldn't be worth it, and the old ones were

noticably weaker.  You'd have to replace half of them anyhow.



As these were some of the first to be installed, the famous Crazy Red

instructions were not finished.  That's fine - I didn't even give Dave the

chance to finish sending them to me, so I can't complain :)  Expect them to

be foolproof - the instructions I did get were good, and he answered all of

my questions very well.  Customer support is one of the biggest reasons to

go with CR.  



Were I to put leather seats in Baby, I'd get the Crazy Red ones in black

with red piping and a red logo on the seatback.  I keep looking at the ones

in Mr. Blue and liking what I see.  Very nice, and it's what Mazda should

have put in there for leather interiors.



Keith and Baby, who thinks Keith is spending a little bit too much time on

Mr. Blue....

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